Welcome to the CSIR Meraka Institute's "COIN" Blog

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Linksys Disaster Recovery

Theres nothing like learning the hard way! As a result of my usual "If it ain't broke, it hasn't been fixed enough" approach to life, I fiddled with the Linksys until it innevitably went into a coma/ vegetative state. How did I manage this you ask? Simple, I started by doing a firmware upgrade using the wrong sveasoft image, which resulted in a moderately upset linksys which refused to talk to me on the web interface. With the help of our trusted Android (Andrew), I managed to do a reset-hold/ ping / tftp recovery and then flashed the poor bugger with OpenWRT, which according to OpenWRT is still not supported by them for the version 2.2 Linksys, which I subsequently found out I was using! So alas, all that remained was a perfectly dead Linksys, not responding to anything. It was time to go in, screwdrivers a blazing. I shorted out pins 15 and 16 and started up the Linksys, this created a crc error which was detected on boot, this then started up an emergency TFTP server which allowed me to ping and finally tftp the original Linksys firmware back onto it!

More details on the recovery processes can be found here:
OpenWrtDocs/Troubleshooting - OpenWrt

Whew!

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

War-Driving: Using Kismet and a GPS

This article ""Configuring and Using Kismet"" has a nice tutorial on how to setup Kismet and your GPS on Linux. Also look at the related links on the site for some info on hacking the Linksys!

Saturday, April 02, 2005

How to get ubuntu to automatically start programs when user logs in

If you want ubuntu to automatically login aparticular user and start user programs after login

From Gnome, Select Computer, System Configuration, Login Screen Setup.
Under Auomatic Login, Select check box: Login a user automatically on first bootup. Choose a user under: Automatic login username

To start programs automatically when user logs in edit the following script
~/.gnome2/session-manual

Here is my example:


[Default]
num_clients=3
0,RestartStyleHint=3
0,Priority=50
0,RestartCommand=x11vnc -shared -forever
1,RestartStyleHint=3
1,Priority=50
1,RestartCommand=mount /mnt/win_c
2,RestartStyleHint=3
2,Priority=50
2,RestartCommand=mount /mnt/win_d